These people left some of the biggest tech companies in the world to advocate ethical technology

Data mining, live app tracking, addiction, misuse of personal information—where are we headed? We live in a world where every minute of every day is determined by data, where our self-worth is validated over a couple hundred likes and comments on a virtual platform. For a few years now, some of the biggest tech companies in the world including Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook (now Meta), Google, Netflix and others have been under scrutiny by various authorities for activities including but not limited to, data mining, that is typically defined as, ‘the process of sorting through large data sets to identify patterns and relationships that can help solve business problems through data analysis.’ The problem arises when confidential and personal information of consumers is taken and used for commercial gains. While this is the overarching problem in today’s tech-driven world, the mental and emotional implications of social media addiction cannot be ignored either. Such unethical practices have been called out time and gain and there has been a glimmer of hope since several tech experts left their job with industry giants to advocate safe and ethical technology. 

Tim Kendall 

In 2020, former Facebook and Pinterest monetisation executive, Tim Kendall said that he had been an active part of the team that strived to make Facebook ‘as addictive as cigarettes’ until he realised that it was likely to cause a civil war in real time. "We took a page from Big Tobacco's playbook, working to make our offering addictive at the outset," Kendall said during the testimony before the Congress, two year ago. Not long after, he realised social media and tech addiction was as bad, if not worse as drug addiction. “I am picking out the family at the restaurant that’s not looking at each other and staring at their phones and thinking, ‘Look at Facebook, its ruining families,” he stated in a recent interview. Since he left the tech giants, Kendall co-founded an app called ‘Moment’ that aims to enforce healthy and positive screen-time habits for its users and help them monitor their consumption of technology. Today, Kendall also spends his time speaking to other tech start-ups on building a sustainable and ethical business model to ensure absolute transparency. 

Tristan Harris 

In 2007, Tristan Harris, who was a computer science graduate from Stanford University launched a start-up called ‘Apture’ which was acquired by Google, after which he was pulled into working as a design ethicist with the Google Inbox team. After working there for three years, Harris recognised serious ethical problems within the company. He realised that he wasn’t able to resolve them while being on the inside and so, in 2015, Harris left Google and co-founded the ‘Centre for Humane Technology,’ a non-profit organisation whose mission to align with humanity’s best interests. They work with a range of people right from tech experts and policymakers to students and teachers.  “Technology steers what two billion people are thinking and believing every day. It’s possibly the largest source of influence over two billion people’s thoughts that has ever been created. Religions and governments don’t have that much influence over people’s daily thoughts,” Harris said in an interview about the extent of the problem. His TED Talks and other discussions have offered a host of solutions starting with self-awareness: it’s essential to understand that we experience the world through a mind and a meat-suit body operating on evolutionary hardware that’s millions of years of old, and that we’re up against thousands of engineers and the most personalised data on exactly how we work on the other end.” Another simple, innovative and effective recommendation was to create a ‘Let’s meet’ button instead of the comments button to debate and discuss politics or other opinion-heavy ideas. 

Justin Rosenstein 

Justin Rosenstein is an American software programmer and entrepreneur who was part of the small group in Facebook to invent the ‘like button’ originally intended to, ‘send little bits of positivity across the platform’. No one anticipated the consequences of that single button. He’s spoken about the psychological and emotional impact of a feature like this across social media. In 2008, Rosenstein left Facebook to co-found ‘Asana’, a work management platform to help users organise and manage their work and time and improve office productivity, given how mobile phones and social media platforms can be a constant source of distraction. 

Deborah Raji

Founder and director of ‘Project Include,’ a non-profit organisation to provide engineering education to underserved immigrant communities, Deborah Raji has focused her entire career on ethical technology, data and artificial intelligence. She is currently a fellow with Mozilla with a focus on studying algorithmic bias and AI accountability. She has also worked with Google’s ethical AI team and also featured in the documentary, Coded Bias on MIT Media Lab Researcher, Joy Buolamwini’s discovery of racial bias in face recognition algorithms. 

Jeff Seibert 

Jeff Seibert is an entrepreneur and an investor, who featured in the globally acclaimed documentary, The Social Dilemma. He is best known for co-founding Crashylitics, a software company that has been designed to collect, analyse, and organise app crash reports, that was eventually acquired by Twitter. Seibert is an expert on data privacy and related matter and his blog often speaks about the unethical use of private data, the importance of transparency in business and more. Two years after being promoted to Head of Consumer Product for Twitter in 2015, he promised himself that he would never work in ads-based social media. “Social media’s impact on the world today is real, and it is devastating. The status quo is unsustainable, and these companies need to treat this seriously and make material changes to their platforms, more rapidly than they are currently doing so,” he writes. Since then, he has worked closely with Tristan Harris and has co-founded ‘Digits’ a software to help businesses grow in an ethical and sustainable manner. 

Aza Raskin 

Today, an advocate for ethical technology, Aza Raskin was definitely your type-A techie. His father Jeff Raskin has been an early member of Apple along with Jobs. Raskin’s first solo venture was a crowdsourced map for NGOs after the 2010 Haiti earthquake. Since then, he was the founding member of several applications such as Songza, which was backed by Amazon and was also part of the team that built an early version of Mozilla Firefox. And in 2006, Raskin built the ‘infinite scroll’ feature that is today used widely among social media websites to prolong user engagement. This has resulted in excessive screen time, addiction and more. But when he realised that the very features that were being used for profit-driven motives could be used to create a positive impact on the people—start getting them to eat healthier, combat racism and more. In 2015, he co-founded the Centre for Humane Technology along with Harris. Today, he is no longer an active user on Instagram and uses Twitter increasingly infrequently. His recommendations for ethical tech also include policy changes, where ad dollars would be directed towards funding meaningful causes.